The Story Behind the Return of ‘The Wiz’

BETHPAGE, N.Y. — Perched atop a spiky chariot, Mary J. Blige rolled onto a set here and began making demands. “What’s that there?” she yelled, pointing to an invisible blotch. Underlings scurried to clean up. “Worrrk!” she bellowed.

Ms. Blige, the enduring R&B star, was rehearsing her part as Evillene, the Wicked Witch of the West, in “The Wiz,” the enduring musical, which NBC will broadcast live on Thursday night at 8, Eastern time. As with its live-broadcast predecessors “The Sound of Music” and “Peter Pan,” the cast is a mix of Broadway, television and film veterans, alongside music stars like Queen Latifah as the Wiz, and Ne-Yo as the Tin Man. There will be spectacle, too, in the form of Cirque du Soleil acrobats.

Unlike the audiences of the previous shows, Thursday’s viewers may get a chance to see this one again, off screen: “The Wiz” is already scheduled for a Broadway run next year, with much of the same design, costuming and choreography, including the Cirque performers. For the actors, then, it amounts to a live televised tryout.

Ms. Blige has been cramming. In a break from rehearsals last week, she talked about plumbing her “nasty, dark side” and showed off her crimson-tipped nails, which she has been growing long to feel witchy. She lobbied to play Evillene, she said, because the character’s number “Don’t Nobody Bring Me No Bad News” is one of her favorites.

“My sister and I were singing this song recently, before I even got the part, just playing around with it,” she said. “Something about that ‘no bad news’ part relates to me now as a businesswoman: I don’t want to hear it. I want you to make it happen.”

For a while, though, it looked as if a full-fledged new “Wiz” might never happen.

An urban adaptation of “The Wizard of Oz,” “The Wiz” won seven Tonys after it opened in 1975, a milestone for a show with an all-black cast, and introduced the song “Home,” sung by Stephanie Mills, as a radio hit. It became a cultural touchstone, especially for African-American audiences, who grew up on the over-the-top 1978 film version starring Diana Ross and Michael Jackson, a pricey critical flop that went on to have a devoted following. The show is also a school theater staple.

But a 1984 Broadway revival was short-lived. And a starry Encores! concert production in 2009 at City Center that featured members of the creative team now behind “Hamilton” generated tepid reviews that seemed only to remind critics of the show’s flaws.

Live theater on TV has taken its licks, too. “The Sound of Music” drew enormous viewership, “Peter Pan” far less, and hate-watching (and –tweeting) such shows has become the norm. That hasn’t stopped Fox from jumping in with “Grease,” coming in January.

Neil Meron and Craig Zadan, who also produced the last two NBC broadcasts and have been trying to get “The Wiz!” made since 1998, knew that it needed more than a little tinkering to stick. They wanted the score, by Charlie Smalls, to sound more pop, and the choreography, by George Faison, to seem slicker. They brought in the choreographer and video director Fatima Robinson, known recently for her work with Pharrell Williams.

For serious theater cred, they hired Kenny Leon, whose Broadway bio includes “A Raisin in the Sun” and “Fences,” to direct. He, in turn, brought in Harvey Fierstein to revamp the book.

Yes, that Harvey Fierstein.

Mr. Fierstein took the meeting while contending that he was not the right fit. “‘The Wiz’ is as culturally important as ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ was to me as a kid,” Mr. Fierstein said. “When I saw a stage full of Jews, it changed my perspective on life. I assumed the experience would be like that for an African-American kid at the theater, to see a show that was created by African-Americans, and I said, that’s why I can’t write it.”

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Amber Riley, center, as Addaperle and Shanice Williams as Dorothy.

CreditVirginia Sherwood/NBC

But when Mr. Leon reminded him that the show’s original book writer, William F. Brown, is white, Mr. Fierstein signed on.

(In a phone conversation, Mr. Brown, 87, said he still held the rights to the book for Broadway with his wife and co-writer, Tina Tippit, and was dismayed not to be involved in the TV version. He did see a rehearsal at the invitation of Cirque du Soleil, and though he conceded that Mr. Fierstein did not make too many tweaks, “I like my version better,” he said.)

Among Mr. Fierstein’s missions was to flesh out the back story for Dorothy, played by the 19-year-old newcomer Shanice Williams in her professional debut.

Geoffrey Holder’s original whimsical costumes are now Broadway classics, but the television version’s designer, Paul Tazewell (“Hamilton”), borrowed from streetwear and haute couture. The cornfields of Dorothy’s Kansas have been reimagined as a Thai-style terraced landscape, with Asian temples in Munchkinland. But unlike the multistage “Peter Pan,” “The Wiz” has just one proscenium-style stage with digital backdrops — easier for Broadway and TV.

During rehearsals, as backflippers and Pogoing stilt walkers filled the stage, Mr. Leon was pushing for naturalism. “That was good, crows!” he called out after a run-through of a scene with the Scarecrow (Elijah Kelley). “Keep the performances really simple and sincere.”

Authenticity was part of the appeal of casting the untested Ms. Williams. A New Jersey native, she auditioned at an open call in New York after spending two semesters studying musical theater in Los Angeles. She had done the show in middle school, playing Addaperle, a good witch, because back then “I was too nervous to audition for Dorothy,” she said.

Wearing pink socks and T-strap dance shoes in rehearsal, she held her own, buoyed by the presence of Ms. Mills, who originated Dorothy on Broadway and here plays Auntie Em. (Among others in the cast are David Alan Grier as the Cowardly Lion, and Uzo Aduba as Glinda the Good Witch.)

While the show’s score includes such time-tested numbers as “Ease on Down the Road,” the music producer Harvey Mason Jr. added contemporary R&B rhythms, and Ms. Robinson injected the Nae Nae and Whip. “There’s a new dance called dabbing,” she said, a head tap to the biceps. “N.B.A. players are starting to dunk and dab. So we have the Tin Man dabbing.”

And there’s a new anthem for Dorothy and her yellow-brick-road friends, “We Got It,” jointly written by Ne-Yo, the musical director Stephen Oremus and others.

It’s the kind of collaboration that Ne-Yo could have scarcely envisioned when he first watched the movie as a boy with his family — one of the few things that kept them home together, he said, and an inspiration for his own career. “I can see myself in these characters,” he said, adding: “I wanted to be a part of this, no matter what. Like I didn’t care, I’ll sweep. It’s our responsibility to bring this story to the next generation.”

He’s hardly the only performer for whom “The Wiz” is personal. It was Queen Latifah‘s first Broadway show, and she remembers sitting spellbound, dreaming of being onstage. As one of three Dorothys in her seventh-grade production at St. Ann’s Catholic school in Newark, she got to sing “Home.”

“That was my first standing ovation,” she said. “It was life-changing. I’m like, ok, I can do this again.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Newly Streetwise, ‘The Wiz’ Sails to TV. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe